Causeries du lundi Author:Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BUFFONi Monday, 21 July 1851. Those who are not savants, and who wish to plunge into the vast reading of Buffon's Works and to find their way among them, c... more »ould not take a safer guide, a clearer and more accurate interpreter than M. Flourens, who has rendered a new service to all classes of readers by this excellent work. Nor should Cuvier's article on Buffon, in the Biographic universelle, be neglected ; every word in it has its measure and its weight. From a different point of view, and for one who has any desire to appreciate the importance of the questions raised and still discussed around the great name of Buffon, we ought to put into the scales the highly important Study which Geoflroy-Saint- Hilaire devoted to him (Fragments biographiques), as well as what his son and worthy heir, M. Isidore Geoffroy-Saint- Hilaire, has said in his Considerations historiques sur la Zoologie. With regard to the style, the writer and the man, M. Villemain appears to have exhausted the subject in one of his finest Lectures on the Literature of the Eighteenth Century. I will take quick and abundant advantage of all these aids in the little I shall be able to say here of Buffon. Buffon, the last to vanish of the four great men of the eighteenth century, closed this century so to say on the day of his death, the 16 April 1788. Born at Montbar, in Burgundy, in September 1707, he was five years older than Jean-Jacques Rousseau; he was thirteen years junior to Voltaire and eighteen years to Montesquieu. His father, M. Le Clerc, was a Councillor in the Parliament of Dijon, which at that time contained many men of study and learning, many a person of good stock in whom theold sap had not dried up. Buffon, moreover, used to say that he took especially after his mother, of whom he would speak te...« less